efterklang + kristian leth: modern drift.

I first discovered Danish experimental pop collective Efterklang when some of their music was featured in Jeremiah Zagar’s brilliant family autobiographical film “In A Dream.” Both the film and the music were some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

Efterklang’s sound is ethereal and dreamy and huge. Luckily, it leaves itself so open to visual interpretation. Not a blank canvas, but a launching pad, ready to propel the song into whatever video the lucky director gets to imagine.

For “Modern Drift”, that director is Danish multi-media artist Kristian Leth. The song is gorgeous, and for it Leth has sewn together a stunning and simple vision of nature and life that is achingly lovely.

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jeremiah + isaiah zagar: in a dream.

I love this. I love it a lot.

For more than 40 years, Philadelphia-based artist Isaiah Zagar has slowly, with his own hands, graced more than 50,000 square feet with intricate mosaics and murals. His youngest son, film-maker Jeremiah Zagar, has chronicled his troubled but brilliant father’s life, art, and relationship with his mother, Julia, in his new documentary “In A Dream.” I freaked out a little the first time I saw the trailer…

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“In A Dream” has been kicking ass and taking names on the film fest circuit, and I hope it comes to Toronto soon. Very soon. I will have to pout and gnash me teeth until it does. I read on We Make It Good, the Shilo™ blog where I picked up this little gem, that it’s going to be on HBO in Summer 2009.

The Zagar goodness doesn’t end there though. For one of the bands featured in the soundtrack for the film, Denmark’s Efterklang, Jeremiah created a vid made up of alternate takes and un-used footage from the film to create the video for “Cutting Ice To Snow.”

With the video, just like his father, the younger Zagar has taken the small bits and pieces of colour and light and fashioned them into something beautiful. Murals, mosaics, film, and sound – both Zagars have built beauty out of the pieces that their hearts are drawn to. Such exquisite scavenging. More like a short film than a music video, it’s joyous but also sad as you watch the elder Zagar crush and carve and shape light refracting from his patterns of glass, knowing the emotional storm he’s fighting to hold within himself as he works.

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Via We Make It Good